


make your bed with bones and lie in it

by inquisitor_tohru



Category: The Locked Tomb Trilogy | Gideon the Ninth Series - Tamsyn Muir
Genre: Character Study, F/F, Holding Hands, Non-Sexual Intimacy, Relationship Study, Sharing a Bed, Skeletons
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-14
Updated: 2021-02-14
Packaged: 2021-03-14 21:29:29
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 800
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28677450
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/inquisitor_tohru/pseuds/inquisitor_tohru
Summary: Gideon woke to the rattling of bones and a pathetic groan, as Harrow rolled off a bed of literal skeletons.
Relationships: Gideon Nav/Harrowhark Nonagesimus
Comments: 8
Kudos: 55
Collections: Chocolate Box - Round 6





	make your bed with bones and lie in it

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Urist](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Urist/gifts).



> I couldn't stop laughing about the idea that Harrow "keeps falling asleep in a pile of bones" (seriously, thank you for that image!)  
> I hope you enjoy this treat even half as much as I enjoyed reading your griddlehark prompts ♥

Gideon woke to the rattling of bones and a pathetic groan, as Harrow rolled off a bed of literal skeletons. It wasn't a particularly unusual occurrence, but that didn't mean she was getting any more used to it.

"What the hell, Nonagesimus?" she groaned, more into her pillow than to Harrow herself. "You promised me six hours of sleep. It's been three, tops." To be honest, she'd expected Harrow to be out roaming the corridors for the rest of the night like she'd taken it upon herself to haunt the house, and doing whatever weird necro shit it was that she did. It's why she hadn't felt weird about taking the bed. That, and because she was about to pass out from sheer exhaustion after their little adventure in the basement.

Gideon felt her eyes roll before she was aware of doing it when Harrow...replied, if you could truly call it that. It was more a jumble of grunts and things that sounded like they might have been words before she mangled them with her pinched little mouth.

"Here," Gideon said, pulling the covers back and almost immediately missing the warm weight of them on her bare legs, "get in." The look on Harrow's face suggested that she'd recently eaten half a dozen particularly bitter lemons. 

"I'm fine where I am," Harrow said through gritted teeth, every syllable an effort as she worked to reconstruct the bone bed. (There was a good pun in there, Gideon knew, but she was too tired to unearth it right now.) 

"Well,  _ I'm _ not. Neither of us are going to get a good night's sleep with you clattering about down there, and, well, we've earned it. We  _ need  _ it." Something in Harrow's expression softened.

"If we're to stay ahead?"

"Yeah? Sure." Gideon was rapidly reaching the point where she'd agree with just about anything Harrow said to get some sleep, and she knew Harrow well enough to know that no good could ever come of that. She needed to get her into bed  _ now. _

That may have come out...not quite right. 

The bones seemed to sing as Harrow rose, and Gideon cursed the draughty old mansion for enabling her necromancer's flair for the dramatic. Or, as she'd only recently begun to consider, maybe Harrow was just a normal girl who found herself in the wrong place at the wrong time as frequently as Gideon did. Well, as normal as a Reverend Daughter of the Ninth House  _ could  _ be, anyway.

Harrow settled near the edge of the bed, lying with her back to Gideon, curled up as if to make herself as small as possible. She didn't even ask for the blankets, though Gideon draped them over her anyway, lest anyone falsely claim she hogged the covers. The creased, grey landscape of the sheet beneath and between them felt so much bigger than it was, like some great chasm, with Gideon on one side and Harrow on the other. Yet even like this, she could feel the heat, the raw  _ power,  _ radiating from Harrow's body. The kind of weird, awkward intimacy that didn't have a name. She could smell the blood, bone, and ash that clung to Harrow's washed-out skin, to her short, oily-black hair, and to her ragged Ninth House robes. She didn't totally hate it. Any of it. Not anymore, not really.

"Griddle?"

"What?"

"Roll over. You snore when you sleep on your back." Gideon snorted as she moved onto her side, a few centimeters away from spooning Harrow. Whether she snored or not, she was pretty sure it wasn't any more obstructive to sleep than lying on something with rib cages instead of slats. Then again, she wouldn't have been all that surprised if everything in Canaan House had been made out of bones, which would probably have been a dream come true for Harrow.

Slowly, Harrow shuffled backwards, extending her skeletal fingers as she reached for Gideon's hand. Sometimes Gideon got to wondering if Harrow looked like a skeleton, or if she shaped her constructs in her own image. Harrow was probably narcissistic enough, she thought with a smirk, recalling the earlier boasts about her necromantic prowess. 

And still, she accepted that bony hand.

"I'll try my best not to snore, oh Mistress of the Night." 

"There is no  _ try,  _ Griddle," Harrow murmured, tugging on Gideon's hand until she was all but enveloped by one of her muscular arms. Maybe she'd misheard Harrow, since what she'd said made no fucking sense, but she wasn't about to ask. She'd meant what she said about sleep. That they'd earned it and, more importantly,  _ needed _ it. Not to stay ahead, as Harrow put it, but to survive.

Because if they could keep on surviving, maybe one day they'd learn how to  _ live. _


End file.
